AntiFreeze Unlocks a Frozen Computer

If your system is frozen, open AntiFreeze and the app will automatically suspend all other running apps to help you find the problem or end-task a known offender.

You're working on a document or opening an application and suddenly your computer slows to a crawl and stops responding. Sometimes it's the newly opened application that's to blame; other times, it's some program running in the background chewing through system resources. You can open the Task Manager to try and find the culprit, but that involves opening yet another app.

Or you could try AntiFreeze, an app that runs in the background, waiting for you to call on it in times of distress (currently it's free for non-commercial use only). If your system is frozen, open AntiFreeze and the app will automatically suspend all other running apps to help you find the problem or end-task a known offender.

AntiFreeze has to run in the background to protect your system, so you'll probably want to run it at startup. It lives in the system tray, and if you find your computer is beginning to slow down, or an app that you've launched is eating a lot of system resources, you may not need it if you can get to it soon enough.

AntiFreeze comes in handy for those times when you're running a number of apps and your system suddenly stops responding. Trying to open the Task Manager may only slow your system down further, and you may find yourself waiting for free CPU cycles for the Task Manager to even open. When this happens and your system is hopelessly frozen, you can either launch AntiFreeze from the taskbar or press its key-command to immediately suspend all running processes and bring up a window where you can sort through them one by one.

The benefit to AntiFreeze is that it suspends all your running processes instead of killing them outright, immediately freeing up your system resources but not killing your apps and forcing you to lose unsaved data. AntiFreeze also allows you to resume apps one by one until you pin down the problematic app, or end processes one at a time until your system responds normally.

However, the app does need to run in the background at all times to be effective when your system freezes, so people paranoid about the amount of free memory may not like that. Even so, the app doesn't use a lot of RAM when running in the background; and the benefit of reclaiming control of your system when it slows to a crawl is certainly worth it. AntiFreeze supports Windows XP, Vista, and Server 2003, in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.